running and running until she reaches

I’ve been thinking a lot about time (this is, perhaps, a mark of having friends who died young).

Time in the sense of deadlines; time in the sense of opportunities and the cost of opportunities; time in the sense of not knowing how much you really have left.

Some years ago one of the women I admire most told me she was all too acutely aware of the ageism of media, and what that meant for the length and quality of our careers, and therefore for the balances (or lack thereof) in our bank accounts. Who gets to be an executive? Not many women past 40, and not many brown and black women of any kind.

You go very quickly from “too young to be worth listening to” to “just young enough to be the new shiny object” to “just old enough to be taken seriously” to “too old to be worth listening to”. What is that span, even? Eighteen years? More if you’ve got good genes, an expensive dermatologist, and a ruthless personal trainer?